


we could be gigantic (everything I need)

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Fluff, Light Angst, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 20:36:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9401978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Skye's woken up in a lot of strange places.  Just not beside a man she doesn't recognize.  Or to find out that she's forgotten the past three years of her life. (A Quakerider amnesia AU.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Give Me a Try by the Wombats.
> 
> I know nothing about brain science, so forgive me for any implausibilities!

She doesn’t know where she is. The bed is all wrong, too wide and too soft, and there’s morning light streaming in through the windows and the faint smell of the ocean and—there’s someone in the bed next to her. And she sleeps alone. She always sleeps alone.

She sits bolt upright and pulls the sheets tight around her, trying to put herself on the opposite side of the bed from him. He’s sprawled on his back, face buried in the pillows, and as she watches him, he stirs drowsily and reaches for the empty space where she was a minute ago.

“Good morning,” he mumbles and turns onto his side to grin at her. “Want to come back over here?”

(Most of her brain is busy panicking. Part of her brain is busy noticing his abs, which is vastly inappropriate for this situation but—Still. They’re really nice.)

“Who—who are you?” she finally manages. “Where am I?”

That’s her plaid shirt crumpled on the carpet and her leather jacket peeking out of the closet. If she squints, she can even make her laptop sitting on top of the dresser, the same neon stickers peeling off the case. Maybe this is her apartment and he's—he’s–but there’s another leather jacket hanging next to hers in the closet and a stack of paperback books written in Spanish on the floor and a photograph of them sitting beside the bed. They’re perched on the hood of a car, arms wrapped around each other, only a few inches away from kissing. He’s beaming at her and she…she looks wildly happy.

“ _Querida_ , what’s wrong?” he asks. He moves towards her and she backs away. “Is everything okay? Did you—did you have one of the dreams again?”

“The dreams.” She’s always had nightmares, bad ones that she wakes up screaming from. She doesn’t let people stay the night because of them but somewhere along the way, she must have made an exception for him.

“This is real. I promise. Everything’s okay, Daisy.”

“My name’s not Daisy,” she blurts out. “It’s Skye.”

His eyes go wide and for just a moment, his face crumples before everything smooths itself back out again. “Skye then,” he says, deliberately keeping his voice low and even. “Skye, tell me what the last thing you remember is?”

“I went to sleep at the base and I—I woke up here.” Her room at the base is tiny, with barely enough room for a bed and a dresser, the tiny bobbling hula dancer that she's had for years perched on top of it. She'd wake up in the mornings and nearly hit her head getting out of bed. But here—there's space everywhere she looks and she can't get used to it. She half expects something to come crashing through the windows or kick down the door. 

“So you work for SHIELD? You're still permanently on call?” he asks slowly. 

“You know about SHIELD? And you—what do you mean, still?” Skye's glancing around the room and wondering what she'd have to quake to get out of here fast enough. Because all of this—the room, the stacks of books that she can see stacked on a chair, the faded plaid blanket draped across the foot of her bed, the man who looks at her with light in his eyes—feels too good to be true. It feels like a home. And if she knows anything, she knows that every home she's found isn't real.

“Shit,” he breathes. “Look, just tell me—tell me what you remember.”

“How do I know that I can trust you?” she demands sharply.

He looks at her and just sighs. “Okay,” he says and pulls back the covers to get out of bed. She tries very hard not to let her eyes flick over to his bare chest. “I'm going to call Fitzsimmons.”

“Both of them?”

“Do you want me to try Jemma first?” he asks. “I—I can call whoever you want.”

Skye slumps back against the headboard, reeling. Jemma—Jemma's here. And if she's here, if she's alive and safe and she survived wherever the Monolith sent her, then maybe all of this is real too. 

 

When Jemma arrives at her front door, Skye throws her arms around her like she's never going to let go. “We thought you were gone,” she says when she finally eases her grip on the other woman. “The rock took you and we thought it was never going to give you back.”

“It didn't want to,” Jemma says quietly, her eyes briefly darkening. “But it turns out that Fitz is more stubborn than even an intergalactic rock.”

“How—how long ago did you get back?” It can't have been too long, she tells herself. But she's cataloging how Jemma's face is fuller, how there are new laugh lines around her eyes, how her hair's longer, twisted up into a messy bun with curls escaping everywhere. And then she sees the ring. “Jemma, are you—did you get married?”

“You really don't remember, do you?” Jemma looks like she can't decide whether to be horrified or fascinated. “Dai—Skye, Fitz and I got married a year and a half ago. You were there.”

Eventually they go inside, to sit at the bright blue kitchen table that she apparently sanded and painted herself five months ago, to drink lemonade out of the jam jar glasses that he says they bought together at a farmers' market and to make a list of everything that she has forgotten. 

Coulson isn't the Director any longer. (He and May are running a winery somewhere up in Napa and she can't decide whether or not she's surprised.) Mack is. Fitz and Jemma are married and have a baby boy named Theo, who's almost three months old now. There are pictures of Skye holding him and beaming with delight, pictures of Skye and May and Elena at Jemma's bachelorette party, of Jemma and Fitz having their first dance at their wedding. And there are things that Jemma only tells her slowly and haltingly, her tongue stumbling over the words. Things like what was waiting on that planet and what it did to her and what Lincoln did for all of them. Because Lincoln, with his sunny smile and easy laugh, is gone. And somewhere along the way she met this man who sits in her (their) kitchen like it's where he belongs. Whose name she doesn't even know.

“I'm sorry.” Skye looks over at him, where he's leaning against the counter and watching her quietly and intently. “But I just realized that I don't—what's your name?”

“Right.” He sighs heavily. “It's Robbie. Robbie Reyes.”

“And we're...”

“Dating. Living together. For almost a year now—the living together. The dating for a while before that.” There are other words he isn't saying, about who and what they are to each other, about how she came to trust him enough that he sleeps next to her every night. 

“How did we meet? Did you know that I was a SHIELD agent? Did we--” She stops short and wraps her hands around her glass so she doesn't fidget. She's a trained agent of SHIELD, not the achingly eager girl who flinched away from pulling a trigger and only landed half her punches. May taught her not to wait and let other people give her the answers.   
“You weren't an agent when we met. You'd gone rogue,” Robbie says. “But I burst into flame whenever I got pissed off back then so we both had some issues.”

 

The next day, Skye goes looking for clues. Her house is filled with her: the same plastic hula dancer waving next to a dish of her rings on the dresser, a pair of black Doc Martens waiting next to the door, containers of leftover Chinese and half a box of pizza in the fridge, a box set of Harry Potter books in pride of place in the living room. She flips the first one open only to see an inscription on the title page in bold black handwriting. Daisy--For me, you were always the light. She shuts it quickly, unable to shake the feeling that she's skipped ahead a chapter further than she was supposed to. Because the house is filled with him too: the bowl piled high with lemons and avocados, the Spanish paperback splayed face down on the coffee table, the car parked in the driveway.

It's glossy and black and looks like it still remembers being dangerous. She puts her palm flat on the hood and she could swear that the car almost purrs. 

“That's the charger,” he says. He's holding two bags full of groceries and the same leather jacket she saw yesterday morning, unzipped over a heather gray t-shirt and black jeans, face tipped up to soak in the sun. “It likes you.”

“Did I ever get to drive it?” Skye strokes a hand over the smooth surface of the hood and feels his eyes latch on to her hand. There's something about this car that tugs at her, something that she thinks she could remember if she just thought a little harder, reached a little farther back...Something about fire and the squeal of tires on pavement.

“Sometimes. Once when I was trapped in another dimension and trying to give you directions.”

“Joke?” She raises one eyebrow at him.

“Real. You really think I could make that shit up?”

Skye laughs. And after a moment, he does too.

 

That night, he gives her a stack of photo albums and a handful of stories to go along with them. “Jemma was the one who actually made the albums,” Robbie tells her. “You just take photos and shove them into boxes, then we get drunk and try to figure out which photo was taken when.”

“That sounds like me.” She flips open the first page to them at Disneyland. He's wearing mouse ears and a distinctly mutinous expression. “Did I make you wear the ears?”

“You bribed me into doing it,” he shrugs and flips open another album. They all seem to be camping in this one, along with Jemma and Fitz and Mack and Elena. Jemma and Fitz have a massive telescope, Mack has five marshmallows crammed onto one toasting fork, and she seems to be making fun of both of them. She used to like taking photos back when she was living out of her van and working an endless series of IT temp jobs, even if she was just using her crappy phone camera. She even has a few from SHIELD that didn't end up in a confidential file. 

Skye turns another page to see if Robbie's expression improves. It doesn't, but the picture of him looking like he's about to flip off Chip and Dale is hilarious and the next one, of them smiling again in front of the castle, makes her heart squeeze a little tighter in her chest. “So what did I bribe you with?” she asks casually as she turns another page. 

“Cheese fries. And sex in the car on the way back.”

Oh. Oh.

“And now you're pretending that it's not weird, when you really want to just talk about how weird it is,” Robbie says. “Sorry, I shouldn't have—I didn't--”

“No, no, it's okay! It's fine. Let's just—what would we normally be doing right now? Do we watch Netflix, do we cook, do we have people over, do we track down wrong-doers and bank robbers in our spare time?” Skye doesn't understand how they work, where their rough edges brush up against each other and fit instead of wearing each other down to the bone. How she wakes up with him every morning and goes to sleep next to him every week. How fire and earthquakes didn't result in disaster.

“So you want an itemized schedule? Because we're not exactly the kind of people who run their lives on a schedule.” He sighs and curls his hand into the weave of the carpet. “I don't know what you want me to say, okay?”

“You don't really do the warm and fuzzy thing, do you?” Even as she says it, Skye knows it's not quite true. She remembers the way he looked at her when she first woke up, how he reached out for her almost automatically, the photos she's seen of his arms wrapped around her. Robbie Reyes does have tenderness to him, carved into the corners of his eyes and the angles of his hands. It's just buried deep right alongside the memories that fell out of her head and walked away. 

“You don't really do the delicate fainting flower thing, either.”

“I'm not a flower,” she huffs. “But you could--”

“Could what? Tell me what you want, Skye, and I'll do it. But I'm not going to tip toe around you for the rest of your life, because that's not the way we work. What do you think it's like, to smile and nod and pretend like it isn't killing me that you don't know who I am?” Robbie says sharply.

“I don't know. What do you think it's like, to wake up in bed next to a stranger?” she retorts.

“See that's where you're wrong. Because the exact same thing happened to me.”

“So now we're competing to see who's worse off?” Because she has stories. Stories on top of stories on top of stories and when she thinks about everything she's lost (the parents, the family, the friends, the lovers, the years of memories, the person she became), it's like all the raw places open up in her again. 

“We're not—we're honest with each other. That's all. And I think that you'd want me to be honest with you.” He doesn't look away from her and something like a shock slips down her spine. 

“And you think that you know what I want?”

She's glaring at him. He's glaring at her. And she can hear her pulse pounding wildly in her temples. She wants to shove him backward on the carpet, climb on top of him, and bite down hard on the spot where the curve of his neck meets his shoulder until she leaves a mark. 

Skye thinks that she understands something about she ended up with Robbie Reyes. 

 

She's not going to ask about their sex life. She desperately wants to ask about their sex life. But she's not going to do it. She's not, she's not, she's not--

“Jemma, how much sex did I have on a regular basis?” she blurts out. Maybe an outdoor cafe in Silver Lake isn't the best place to ask about this. They're getting some weird looks from the moms three tables over but it's not like the moms actually have their children with them. And that baby buried deep in its stroller can't possibly understand what she's saying.

“Quite a lot. I'd have to do some calculations to come up with a proper average,” Jemma says thoughtfully.

“Was it good sex?” she prompts.

“I assume so. Why do you ask?” Jemma tilts her head to one side, then the other, like she's performing an examination.

“Just curious.” Skye stares down at her coffee and wills herself not to blush. “We were arguing in the living room and we...I just felt something familiar. Like I'd done something in that exact spot before.”

She thinks that she used to leave bruises at that exact spot on his neck, a small constellation of plum-colored marks barely visible beneath the high collars of his jackets. She thinks that he used to leave marks on the inside of her thighs and across her ribs, that he used to write poems across her skin with his mouth and hands. That she used to be able to feel the echo of his hands for hours afterward. 

She doesn't know if she's right. But she'd like to be.

 

When she gets back from coffee that day, Robbie is sitting in the living room with two bags of takeout, a six-pack of beer, and a slightly sheepish expression. “I have a bad temper,” he says. “You've probably figured that out by now. But I shouldn't have said what I did last night.”

“I said some things that I probably shouldn't have too,” she admits and takes a seat across from him, reaching across to grab one of the beers and crack it open. There's a dent on the coffee table where she thinks she's done the same thing before. 

“The way I see it, neither of us have a clue what the hell is going on. And I don't think that me making lists for you, or compiling some kind of guide to our life, is going to help much. I thought that maybe we should just—live. We'll go to the beach or drive down the coast or go out or dinner or—whatever. You'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. A piece at a time. You'd probably skip to the end of all the lists anyway,” he says, grin tugging at his mouth.

“I would not,” she informs him and leans forward again to investigate what he's brought back. “And I won't share any of the pot stickers unless you take it back.”

“You would. And I'm not giving you any of the chicken and broccoli.”

She makes an indignant sound and tries to swipe it out of his hands. Robbie dodges. (She ends up causing a small—tiny, really—earthquake to get to the chicken. He tells her that she doesn't play fair but he's laughing when he does it.)

 

She's out for dinner with Jemma when she remembers the first thing. She's in the passenger seat of a car—the charger, she thinks, nothing else moves quite like it—and late afternoon light is pouring in through the windshield. There's an old song on the radio and she's leaning across the gearshift to press her lips to his at a red light and the sound of his laugh ripples through the air.

“You want me to miss the light?” he whispers when she pulls away, his mouth red and a little swollen. “In LA, that's considered a crime.”

“Lucky for you,” she tells him. “I have considerable pull with the authorities. I could get rid of your parking tickets and everything.”

“I don't have parking tickets. The charger takes care of that.” He pats the dashboard of the car fondly and she bursts into laughter. 

In the present, Skye freezes and drops her fork with a clatter. When Jemma asks, she says that she's fine. She'll tell Jemma soon, probably prompting some kind of elaborate investigation of what could have triggered the memory, but for now she just wants to keep the moment to herself. Sunshine and air and the faint taste of him on her lips. 

 

There doesn't seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to what she remembers. The burst of spices on her tongue, the sound of old pop music on a kitchen radio, the smell of salt water and the sudden shock of the Pacific in January as she waded in the shallows and pulled him in after her. The feel of his arms around her as they sway back and forth. She never remembers more than a minute or two, nothing that could make sense even if she worked at it. 

She remembers more when she's with him, but Jemma and Fitz have a theory about that. She and Robbie go over to have dinner at their house every Sunday night, where she sprawls out on the rug and makes ridiculous faces at Theo and Robbie and Fitz try to light the barbecue using the flames that he can occasionally conjure up and Jemma drinks mint tea and watches them with an amused expression and a fire extinguisher. Mack and Elena are there sometimes too and even once, when they're sure that no one is watching and Skye jams all the communications channels, Bobbi and Hunter make a brief appearance.

“You know good people,” Robbie tells her on the drive home on Sunday, plastic containers of the leftovers Jemma insisted they take balanced between them.

“They're your people too,” she says almost automatically. The words feel familiar in her throat, the sound of it echoing in her ears. “Have I—have I said that before?”

“Yeah.” He grins down at the steering wheel. “After the first time I agreed to watch one of those 80's robot movies with Mack and Elena.”

 

They crisscross the city in the charger, music always on the radio and two coffees resting between them, and Robbie claims that he's doing it to see if anything might jump start her memory but she thinks he might just be doing it for her. They eat their way through Grand Central Market on the weekends, where he lets her press strange ice cream flavors on him, and wander through the Last Bookstore, where he carries stacks of paperbacks for her. They go to the beach, where she tries to tease him into tanning, and drive up and down the coast. They watch episode after episode of Star Trek sprawled out on their stomachs in front of the TV with cartons of food and argue about whether or not Kirk and Spock are in love. They go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and he watches her try to keep herself from squealing when she sees Hogsmeade. He tries butterbeer even he though he knows he doesn't like it and lets her learn the way he frowns down at it like it's disappointed him personally all over again.

A few weeks after she wakes up, she goes back in to SHIELD. The brick hallways look the same, despite how many times they've been invaded, and Fitzsimmons' lab is still filled with delicate tools and samples that no one else is allowed to touch. The people, though...they look at her differently. Like they're not quite sure she's real. When she figures out that she can fly (technically, according to Fitz, she's using the built up force of her quakes to propel herself into the air but she's calling it flying anyway), she's not quite sure if she's real either.

“Did I get any other superpowers?” she asks Robbie one night. “Can I read people's minds or make energy spears?”

“Nah. Unless you count your supernaturally bad British accent.”

She speaks in it for the rest of the night.

 

They're easy around each other, after a while. He talks to her about his younger brother Gabe, who's off at Stanford getting a degree in physics and who he's convinced is going to help land a man on Mars some day. Sometimes he even mentions the Rider, what it was like having someone else living inside his head. She talks to him about Afterlife, which she still remembers all too clearly, and what it was like to wake up with earthquakes in her bones. Sometimes she even talks to him about her family. Yet there are boundaries between them, so tangible that they might as well be etched into the floor. He never touches her. Not on purpose. Their shoulders will brush when he reaches across the table for something or when he takes a sharp turn in the charger and something sharp and hot goes racing through her every time. But he keeps his eyes on the road and his hands firmly tucked into his pockets and she can't help wondering if he'll ever want to touch her. If she wants him to want to. 

 

She's coming in late from dinner with Jemma (massive burgers and truffle fries and hours of gossip and debates about the latest book they've both been reading) when she sees him in the kitchen. Normally she'd head right back to the bedroom—he's been sleeping in the guest room, despite the fact that she's offered to trade off nights with him—but there's something about the set of his shoulders that makes her stop and turn towards him. “Hey,” she says quietly. “I, uh, I brought dessert back. If you want it. It's cake. German chocolate with dulche de leche frosting. I don't know if you like it but--”

“From Cake Monkey? You have a thing about their banana cake,” he explains. “At least you used to.”

“I think I still do.” She wants to make some kind of joke about cake, but it dies in her throat when he looks at her. 

“I missed you. When you were gone. And now I'm still missing you. It's funny,” Robbie says. His voice is thick and he's twisting a glass of something dark and smoky between his fingers, the kitchen light flickering above his head. “You look just like her. You talk like her, you move like her, you type on your laptop the same way and you laugh at the same jokes. You'll turn around and then I think for a minute that you're back. That you're going to lean forward and kiss me and it'll all be fine. But then I remember that the universe has a twisted sense of humor. And I just miss you so damn much.”

“But I am her,” Skye blurts out. “Or she's me. Just a few years later. And I—I'm remembering things. Flashes of color and light and--”

“What kinds of things?”

“I remember kissing you. In the sunlight, on a beach. The sand and your arms around me and just feeling so...” Happy. Happy like she hadn't been in a long time. Happy at the sheer impossibility of it all, that this man who went to hell and back, who argues with her on an average of at least once a week, who she fought the first time she met, makes her feel like she's lit up from the inside. “I just—I remembered us.”

“We were pretty great.” He's trying to make it light but his voice is rubbed right down to the bone and Skye—and Daisy--

She doesn't think. She just leans across the table and kisses him. At first he freezes in surprise but then he leans forward into the kiss and brings one hand up to twist itself in her hair. It's a careful kiss, soft and slow, and she learns him with every beat of it until her head is spinning. 

Skye leaves their door open that night. All they do is sleep but when she wakes up that morning, she's curled tight around him. (She thinks she could get used to it.)

“I don't know if I'm ever going to remember,” she tells him and knots her hands tight in the sheets. “If I'll ever be the same person that you met again.”

“I like this version of you too. All the versions of you. And if you want me, you've got me.” 

Skye doesn't know if she'll screw this up. She doesn't know if they'll have one too many arguments or if she'll run scared or if one of them will go out into the field one day and never come back. She doesn't know if everything she'll do will be enough. (Because when has it ever been?) But Robbie Reyes looks at her like she fills up his entire world and Skye's willing to trust that Daisy Johnson knew what she was doing. 

So she laces her hand through his and holds on tight.


End file.
